frostbite
by curassavica
Summary: Being fucked up is his specialty.


𝓕𝓇𝑜𝓈𝓉𝒷𝒾𝓉𝑒

The view outside the window is cold; the frostbitten trees a sick blackish color without their summer draped of viridescence, their branches like lithe fingers grasping at the fragment of hope left inside the collective human mind. The pale, arid sky bleeds no emotion, no excitement, and the glass serves as a barrier akin to the one his psyche provides for him and allows him to use almost steadfastly in his daily life; the only difference being that his is of the blackened, concrete, steel variety.

A storm would fit far better in place than the emptiness that plagues him and the drear he currently sees, physically and psychologically. A storm that would certainly ensue the very second the morphine's decanted into his arm and he gets that sick, _sexy_ feeling that he doesn't want to admit he thrives off of in its first few moments of undulation. But the truth is, he _needs it_ because it's the only way to make him _feel._ Because without it, even the sun is hidden away, locked behind a dark restraining enclosure of nothing that he'd otherwise kill himself trying to make into _something_ that he doesn't cover up with illusions of being the shy, ever-knowing scholar ready to help at a moment's notice. And, the neuronal stars in the sky hit him with thoughts of _I don't know what to feel anymore;_ there's a constant racking in his head, this wanting, this _need_ to grasp onto a thought and just _think, but I can't think; what is there to think about? How can I think when I don't know? I don't know anything. Everyone thinks I know everything. I don't._

He doesn't, and he can't know everything, not in this dismal state of nothingness where a void fills his mind and leaves him lying alone, looking up at the frostbitten trees, languishing his frostbitten life.

He just wants to feel warmth. Warmth, and love, and lust, and even something as menial as contentedness, things he himself was spared. He wants to feel all of it without relying on substances and the artificiality they allot; he wants to fall back on real, happy memories and not idealised images.

Everything is chemistry. Exothermic and endothermic reactions; nothing can be created or destroyed, it just has to go somewhere, chemical reaction, transfer of electrons and enthalpy, entropy Δ H, loss = gain and gain = loss. _Everything has to be equal, and everything has to be the same, so how come everybody has feelings and I don't?_

**Anhedonia: inability to feel pleasure; Analgesia: inability to feel pain; Alexithymia: inability to accurately pinpoint or determine one's own feelings.** He knows these terminologies like the back of his hand, and the tertiary of the three seems the most plausible, but he doesn't know anymore. He's a curator of thoughts, knowledge - not feelings, of that he is certain.

Gideon said not knowing what one feels wasn't the same as not being able to feel anything. Gideon also said normality is a social construct, a concept that was concretized simply to divide people into classes, to treat those on the farther end of the spectrum as aberrations rather than human beings with their own thoughts and feelings, and ostracize them as such. Gideon was wrong. Gideon was right. It's all a maelstrom in his mind. He knows he can't truly feel anything - he knew it the first time he saw a dead body up close during a visit to a mortuary in his college criminalistics course and he'd felt numb, without reaction rather than mortified, like his much older classmates had been, and most respectable human beings in general would have been. He knows he's not a human being, either. Humans actually have feelings. He's been dead since birth - a monster - a _zombie_ \- and that's why he's so accustomed to death and grief and has no consideration for the most mauled of innocents. It's why he feels _absolutely fucking nothing_ inside.

He's taken to analyzing his own name now. _Dispenser of provisions,_ it means. So, it's his goddamn birthright to be a dispenser - a _machine_ that provides for other people. Just lovely. He's not a human being, he's a fucking _machine_ and his habitual _dispensing_ of factoids, his attempts to prove he was something resembling a human being when nobody asked, sure as hell solidify that. It was clear the second his mother who's completely out of her goddamn mind used her fucking scatterbrain to think of a name as pathetic, so disgustingly emanating of his life purpose and the shame accompanying it - as fucking 'Spencer'.

So, he was dead from birth and he was fucked from birth _(he can't help but laugh at how it was actually at age eleven, by the same person who dispensed to him his name, his congenital shame - courtesy of the wretched scatterbrain producing yet another episode as it oh-so-concomitantly always has - one where it'd mistook him for his bastard father who knew of his shame and wanted nothing to do with it)_ and the most funny part of it is that he just stood there and took everything like a machine- a fucking _dispenser_ \- takes currency until people get what they need from it and leave it - leave_ him_ \- to stand out in the frostbiting cold, alone, without a care, until somebody new comes along and gets what they want dispensed from it - _him,_ like clockwork. Different people, same intentions. He doesn't know what else he could possibly expect. He was made to be this way, he's not a human being. His feelings, or lack thereof, or what-the-fuck-ever, don't matter and they never have mattered nor will they ever matter because he's just a machine for others to use temporarily. He's not a damn human being, he'll never be cared about, he's perfectly content staying in the cold and that's fucking _okay_ because _he doesn't feel a damned thing._

Not even the drug-induced rage slowly incandescing through his veins - probably powerful enough to make the damn cold go away at all.

_It's funny,_ he thinks, the drugs are the closest thing to genuine care he's received. They make him feel powerful, feel alive, more human than he's ever felt - they don't make him feel like he has to be anyone's damn provider or a machine that exists to give people what they want when they want it. They don't completely, utterly disregard the fact that he almost fucking died for the sake of preserving the integrity of the FBI and spit in his face that it's somehow justified and he should accept it and move on because it was done out of "care" nor do they goddamn leave him when he needs them the most and it's those - perhaps spiteful - reasons he always goes back to them. They make him feel things he could never in a million years capacitate himself to feel, they make him _want_ things and want things desperately. Like right now, he wants to pack up everything and just run away to a place wherein people actually treat him like a human being who does, in fact, have feelings and his own autonomy and he doesn't have a comprehensive plan of where he wants to go which is super un-Spencer Reid-like but at this point he'd rather die than be Spencer Reid anymore.

Although, it's not like Spencer Reid truly existed in the first place.

He's on the cold floor of his bathroom slumped against the bottom drawers of the sink in which all his drug paraphernalia is hidden and while icy dendrites with branches brother to the trees outside form in his veins, fire looms beneath his eyes as he stares at nothing at all. He didn't tie his tourniquet effectively enough; it's come loose, and there's quite a bit of dried blood on the cotton patch, as well as on the tip of the syringe a few inches away from him. There's no light in the room, his brain, his eyes. He's keeping it that way because he knows if there's light he'll be thinking of dark and how there's always dark when there's light, light is dark and dark is light everything is all the same which is why nothing good ever happens to him _it doesn't matter anymore endothermic processes and how he's absorbed everybody's expectations of him they're a part of him and they always have been and nothing can ever change that and there's the fucking goalpost and when he'd been laden underneath layers of fluffy comforters on the one fucking day it just had to snow in Vegas with the smell of booze on her breath pervading the room burning his bedsheets and -_

He's bent over the toilet now, the _[scarcities - eating hasn't really been his thing, lately - not during this twisted love affair]_ of his stomach cascading out of him with all their might, painting a fucked up masterpiece of mucous and saliva tinged with blood all over the porcelain lining and it's funny - if he were in his right mind, he'd be making such a spectacle out of how goddamn unsanitary this is and he'd be brushing until his tongue went numb and he could see the reflection of all his failures in his teeth but he's not, he's so fucked up and he loves it and he doesn't care anymore - he's an exotherm and this is his magnum opus and he couldn't have asked for anything better. Being fucked up is his specialty.

_(-it's why he staunchly prefers pills to booze and loathes snow probably more than his body can capacitate - despite being so damn cold-blooded.)_

He drops to the tiled, ivory floor like a fish out of water and his last thought is that should anyone find him like this - find him in the truly fucked up state he was destined to foster - it not be Morgan.


End file.
